Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Playboy Launches Social Network: “High schoolers, old dudes and your Mom can’t join”
raised a few eyebrows. Now one of the old sovereigns of sexy is getting into the game, too. CrunchGear reports that Playboy is launching their own sexy social networking site just for college students, Playboy U. Playboy U requires all users to have a .edu email addresses, mimicking Facebook’s early policy of only allowing college students to join. They say, “Sorry, but high schoolers, old dudes and your Mom can’t join”. However, The site won’t be as lascivious as the periodical. In what may be a bummer for some, the site will be “an exclusive college-only non-nude social network”. Furthermore, it will be a place to “show your school pride, connect with other students and celebrate the social side of college”. But I’m sure they’re not going to police the whole network for porn.
Student profiles will consist of the usual social network features including, bios, photos, videos, Blogs, and Forums. Schools will have customized pages, parties and on-campus events, and a national radio show with student callers.
Other magazines have been trying to get with the times and fight floundering readership by launching their own social networks too. Rolling Stone recently announced plans for their own network as well. But Playboy may have some better luck with readership already skewing toward the college following.
Lots of college students lament the loss of their exclusive Facebook social network to the older crowd. They may be receptive to a newer, cooler alternative. Something tells me that Playboy may not be the brand to steal their hearts, though.
http://www.techcrunch.com/
Labels: And, can’t, Credibility, dudes, join”, Mom, Network: “High, old, Pictures”, Playboy Launches Social, schoolers, Something, Your
Monday, August 20, 2007
Google Lends Credibility To Sun StarOffice
. The proprietary office suite is based on the same code base as Open Office and was previously offered for $70.
The move was first revealed August 11 but was officially announced August 15.
Don Dodge, Director of Business Development for Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team not surprisingly went negative on the move, writing “What has changed? Star Office has been around for 8 years and has gained no traction.”
To answer Don’s question: credibility.
Google offering StarOffice is a massive credibility boost for the package. The benefits of desktop Microsoft Office alternatives have been promoted for years and although among niche communities they might have found some market share, nothing so far has come close to gaining traction against Microsoft.
General consumers have long since accepted packaged downloads from Google and for good reason; packages such as Picasa and Google Earth are quality offerings that have gained wide acceptance. StarOffice will now benefit from not only becoming a standard download as part of the Google Pack, but also due to the positive consumer sentiment given to most (if not all) downloadable products from Google. Expect StarOffice to have a bigger user base than OpenOffice within 12 months, and at least a measurable marketshare in a similar time frame. It probably wont be double figures, but it will make an impact.
There was no word from Google whether future editions of StarOffice would sync with Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
Labels: Credibility, Google, Lends, Office, phone, polyphonic ringtones, Star, Sun, To
Y Combinator Demo Day: The Summer Startups
Y Combinator held their fall bi-annual Demo Day today at their Mountain View office. The fall demo day featured a whopping 19 companies giving lightning fast 7 minute elevator pitches to a room of press and potential angel investors. The companies were earlier selected during their Summer application drive.
Paul Graham started off the event briskly after an initial mixer, encouraging investors to close deals fast on the 11 week old companies.
Here’s a look at the presenters (note, some of the 19 companies declined mention in this roundup):
We announced Anywhere.FM’s launch earlier last week. They compete in the online music locker space. However, I find a lot of these sites are more a niche segment of the storage market than a full application.
Anywhere.fm is a more consumer friendly music storage solution and has set dead aim at being an online version of iTunes. Anywhere.FM’s site lets you upload your music collection onto their site, create playlists, and play them back anywhere from the web. You can even listen to your friend’s music on a “Buddy radio station”. You can easily start your library with an iTunes uploader.
Over the past two weeks, they have received over 125,000 visits and had over a million songs uploaded to the site.
Today they expanded on their monetization plans, which include advertising, affiliate sales, and premium accounts. They plan on inserting audio ads into your music stream and are in talks with TargetSpot to supply local audio ads. The player’s Buddy radio feature will serve as a discovery engine, which they can sell music through and generate affiliate fees. Finally, a paid premium account will provide higher quality bit rates and other TBA features.
ClickPass is making OpenID one-click consumer friendly. They declined to state greater details for now.
DropBox is another entrant into the online storage market. They are creating a transparent file management system (Mac/Win) that aims to: sync your desktop files on the web, back up files, provide access anywhere, and make files easy to share.
Although they are still in private beta, they showed an example of their product for the Mac. For the demo they showed how files stored in their desktop Dropbox folder were accessible and synced online. Your Dropbox files are backed up online, with a version history to provide easy rollback, and recovery in case you delete them from your desktop system. The files can also be shared via a permalink.
The demo looked slick although they were not able to disclose any details about the scalability of their backend in the short 7 minute presentation. See our previous coverage of the online storage gang.
Versionate is taking on Microsoft Sharepoint, online offices, and the wiki market with their new collaborative document editing application. We covered their launch earlier.
Once you upload your documents to Versionate, you can search your content, control access rights, and edit them in the browser. Currently only Word documents are editable online. Every version of your changes is saved in wiki style. They support viewing for Word, Excel, PDF, OpenOffice, Powerpoint.
Versionate will also be offering a self-hosted version for customers concerned about data security and are pursuing desktop/web integration.
Adpinion is looking to fix banner advertising. To do this, they are helping ad networks target advertising by allowing visitors vote on the advertising preferences. Through the voting, Adpinion can determine what groups of ads go with what groups of users and sites. Since launch, they have been approached by over 180 businesses considering integrating Adpinion into their networks, including CBS.
Reble Music Sharing
File sharing is very popular (13 million users connected to eDonkey at any time). However, it’s also very illegal. Reble music is looking to make file sharing legal by avoiding a lot of the legal issues that got a lot of other startups sued into oblivion (unless you’re in Russia). To ensure this, they’ve been talking with the music industry from the very beginning.
The biggest legal complication Reble will avoid on their P2P network is downloading. Instead, users will use their desktop application to stream music to their computers from their friends. Streaming from friends computers also avoids the internet radio limitations imposed on other legal streaming solutions. Yet it still leaves recording artists open to piracy because stream capturing software is available for people who know what they’re doing.
Their end goal is to use the service as a music discovery engine and drive affiliate sales.
One of the most championed features of blogs is the conversation. However, commenting systems on a lot of blogs are still somewhat lacking. Disqus is another startup looking to fix this by enhancing the comments. Disqus supports full moderation, spam and troll filtering, voting, threading, and more importantly a forum. For each post made on your blog, Disqus will generate a forum on their server, where users can continue the conversation in depth. They plan on monetizing through a business class version of the product.
As more blogs add the feature, Disqus will also be able to connect the conversation across blogs. Their plugin is currently live on Fred Wilson’s blog. We expect to see more when they officially launch.
Fauxto is an online version of Photoshop made in flash. The functionality is pretty amazing and includes layering, all sorts of tools, and effects. For the demo they live edited a photo of Steve Ballmer from the web by adding a Google logo to his forehead and changing his eyes to a nice baby blue. You can save the edited photos to your desktop or the web.
Over the past three months they’ve been live the site has grown to 56,000 registered users without any promotion. Their initial plans for monetization include licensing their technology.
Fuzzwich is one of my latest internet addictions. It’s a a dead simple way creating and publishing animated shorts out of a pre-generated cast of characters and backgrounds. They add more and more each day. Since launch users have viewed over 50,000 animations and added a new cast of animated characters.
Today they’ve previewed a new advertising engine through customizing their characters through branded goods. For instance, you can dress your character up in Gap, or pimp your ride with the latest web bling. Because they control all the content that goes into the videos, it seems like a more effective way of incorporating advertising into user generated content than with social video. New creatives can easily be added and hyperlinked to connect to purchase points. Lately indie music labels have contacted also them about possible music promotions.
The Slapvid guys have changed their startup and come back as a hardware startup, Cloudant. Their router promises to take full advantage of your bandwidth by simultaneously downloading multiple parts of a file. They say this is possible for a large number of the files you download online because of the range request abilities built into the HTTP spec. This means that your router can open multiple connections to a site and download multiple chunks of a file in parallel.
The router will also have other advanced features, such as network security out of the box, creating a peer to peer content distribution network amongst the routers, and embedded applications pre-installed on the box. For the demo, they showed their router download a large high-quality image file in about 16 minutes, compared to the Y Combinators old router taking an hour.
They plan on releasing a beta in May of 2008 and are seeking a 500K investment to get the production going.
Mark Hendrickson took some photos of the event with the help of Babak Nivi’s (Venture Hacks) iPhone. Click the image below for more.
Labels: Chairman, Combinator, Day: The, Demo, FutureBazarOnline.com, Kongregate, Labels: child, phone, samsung, Startups, Summer, Y
Facebook Takes Action Against “Black Hat” Apps
applications are using highly questionable tactics to spread themselves virally. Users have noticed and complained, and Facebook took action today to put stop the most egregious behavior. There are two ways application developers are breaking the rules to get new users. The first: When a user looks at an application on his/her profile the application can show something different than when other users view the profile. So a user adds an application that looks nice to them. But everyone else sees, say, a big yellow box with an advertisement that says the user wants you to add this application, too.
The second and more devious scheme is being used by many of the largest application developers. They all involve some sort of notification fraud. Generally, you add an application. Then, every one of your contacts is notified that you’ve “written on their wall” or “have asked them a question,” even though you never did. To view the content the contact must add the application. They then find out there is no wall comment, or its a canned question like “is it ok to kiss on the first date?”
Super Wall (RockYou, 4.5 m installs), My Questions (Slide, 6.9 m installs) and FunWall (Slide, 3.6 m installs) all do this (and users complain loudly in the comments area to the apps - see here and scroll down).
Facebook Hits Back
Facebook took measures today to stop these kinds of activities. The first is dealt with in the new release (1.1) of FBML, the markup language used to build Facebook applications. Developers will no longer be able to show a different profile to friends than the one the user sees him/herself:
One of the key parts of the success of the design of the Facebook profile is that the user is always aware of exactly what their profile looks like to their friends who stop by to view their profile. This enables users to understand exactly how they are expressing themselves to others by simply deciding whether or not they like an application’s profile box and the content that the developer has decided to put into the box.
Right now, we have made a few FBML tags available that are causing users to not trust the content in the profile box. Tags such as: fb:if-user-has-added-app, and other fb-if tags. These tags are currently being used to deliver content to profile boxes which users are unaware of. Content such as big yellow boxes which say “ADD THIS APPLICATION!” or “ADD SOME OTHER APPLICATION!”.
Starting today, these tags will no longer be available for use in profile boxes. We will be migrating FBML to version 1.1, and adding a new set of tags called fb:visible-to-. They are:
fb:visible-to-owner
fb:visible-to-friends
fb:visiible-to-user
fb:visible-to-added-app-users
fb:visible-to-app-users
Facebook also notified developers today that they will be blocked from sending misleading notifications to users. This will stop Slide, RockYou and others from mass spamming users with false notifications:
Over the last few weeks we have noticed several developers misleading our users into clicking on links, adding applications and taking actions. While the majority of developers are doing the right thing and playing by the rules, a few aren’t – and are creating spam as a result. Going forward, if you are deceptively notifying users or tricking them into taking actions that they wouldn’t have otherwise taken, we will start blocking these notifications. The bottom line is that if the notifications you send are the result of a genuine action by a Facebook user and that action is truthfully reported to the recipient so they can make an informed decision, you should have no problems. If you do find some notifications blocked, it was probably because this wasn’t the case and we will be happy to inform you of some best practices by other developers that have prevented this issue.
Facebook has done a great job in managing their platform since opening it up to developers of applications. They have had to accommodate application developers while at the same time protect users interests and the general security of the site. The changes that Facebook have made today, while they may inconvenience some application developers, have clearly been done to protect users from spammy tactics that some applications have employed.
Labels: Action, Against “Black Hat” Apps, Facebook, FutureBazarOnline.com, handsfree speaker, Marketplace; Users, Names, neeta lulla, painkillers, sharp, Takes
TierraNatal: Connecting Mexicans In North America
The bilingual site focuses on location based networking with users being asked to specify their place of birth (or hometown) in Mexico. Users are encouraged to use the service as a way of keeping in contact with friends and relatives who might have moved elsewhere, such as the United States. Over 300,000 Mexican towns and cities are listed.
Design wise it’s one of the better social networking sites I’ve seen in recent times. The usual array of social networking features (profiles, pics, blogs etc) are combined with some decent looking graphics and a functional layout that works well.
The site competes with Spanish language/ Mexican focused version of MySpace and LatinoAIM Pages.
TierraNatal was founded by Liliana Townshend and was developed by San Diego based Digital Telepathy.
Labels: America, Connecting, FutureBazarOnline.com, in, Marketplace; Users, Mexicans, North, Pictures”, TierraNatal:
Sunday, August 19, 2007
MyProgress Lets You Track Your Progress
offers a service that provides progress monitoring features (generally used in computer role playing games) for life tracking. MyProgress allows users to track their personal finances, skills, “knowledges”, wealth and health dynamics.
The site tracks every piece of information users enter, from a new purchase, capital gains, an hour of photographic or driving experience, or a rental price change, and provides a detailed overview on how fast they are progressing in comparison with the others across multiple categories, such as age, occupation, and location. The service provides analytics about user’s life and build forecasts based on past data.
MyProgress is billed as the world’s first online application “designed to helping an individual [not a corporate] manage their progress and read their life log as an RSS feed.”
Labels: Edward, Facebook, FutureBazarOnline.com, handsfree speaker, integrated handsfree speaker, Lets, mp3 capability, Mueller, My, Pictures”, Progress, samsung, Track, You, Your
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